From a DIY pedicure to a tower of discarded shoes, Polly Brown investigates the manifold ways one might find to waste time

When you’re working to a deadline or you’re shamefully late to leave the house, how many different activities have you found yourself inadvertently pursuing in order to delay the inevitable? Polly Brown’s new series, cheekily entitled WORKING(hard), is all about procrastination, distraction and boredom; the irresistible seduction of scrolling through Facebook or reorganising your drawers when a more pressing task weighs heavy on your mind.

Brown’s preferred means of procrastination, funnily enough, is taking photographs – an activity which conveniently fools innocent onlookers into believing she’s busily grinding away. Subsequently, the offshoots of her own least productive moments are rotated 180 degrees and presented as a series in and of themselves. A clever means of recycling wasted time into a shiny new piece of work, no? If only we could all reconfigure our own hours spent rewatching Freaks and Geeks, or mindlessly reordering our bookshelves in colour order, for the sake of a greater good.